Charlie was panting now, the fast, hot breaths puffing against the skin of my neck.
“This is such a bad idea,” he said, lowering his chin to his chest. “What are you doing here, Hudson?”
I took a chance and slid my arms around him to hold him closer. “I want to feel what it’s like. I want to know if it’s just you who does this to me.” Some deeper part of my brain realized how selfish that sounded. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to be anyone’s experiment…”
Charlie looked up at me, green eyes deepening with an open heat I hadn’t seen in them before.
“Let’s go.”
The taxi to the hotel was a blur. The driver chatted Charlie up with an accent so thick, I couldn’t pick out a single word. Charlie’s voice, on the other hand, was tinged with an edge of nerves. I realized I’d already reached for his hand at some point, and our fingers toyed with each other softly on the seat between our thighs. With each brush of our skin, my stomach filled with more and more flipping fish until there was an ocean of excitement and nerves churning in my gut.
Every movement of Charlie’s body alerted the hairs on my skin like tiny sensation receivers. His feet were crossed over one another in the footwell, and there was just a peek of ankle skin visible below the hem of his pants. I felt my breathing speed up as I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. His gaze was focused straight ahead as he responded to something the driver had said, but his body moved slightly closer to me while he spoke. By the time I spotted the sign for my hotel, we were pressed together from knee to hip to shoulder.
It took all of my self-control not to pull him even closer. My heart hammered for his nearness. My skin begged for his touch. My lips tingled for his kiss. I looked away, wondering how this one man could have so quickly turned me into such a confused mess.
I watched misty rain coat the windows of the overheated car and sighed a breath of relief when it pulled up in front of my hotel. I didn’t realize how tightly I’d ended up clasping Charlie’s hand until I reached for my wallet and felt his own grip loosen.
After paying the driver with some of my last cash, I grabbed Charlie’s hand again and led him into the cold night air and through the hotel lobby to the elevators, not even caring that people would see me touching him so intimately. My need grew and grew as we neared the bank of elevators until it just became too much to contain and I found myself suddenly pulling Charlie into an alcove. I turned him and used my larger body to back him up against the wall. He opened his mouth to say something, but I just couldn’t wait another moment to kiss him, to touch him, to taste what that delectable mouth offered.
The second my lips landed on his, I was gone.
Gone.
They tasted so sweet… pure and plump and ripe for the taking. I wanted to keep my mouth on his for the rest of my damned life if this was how good his kiss felt.
My hands held each side of his face while I plundered his mouth, my tongue seeking more and more and more. I wanted to learn every last bit of what it felt like to kiss the beautiful man, and I wanted to drag my lips down across the inches of creamy skin to find the warm expanse of silk under his clothes.
I’m kissing a man.
That sentence ran through my mind on repeat several times before I recognized I was mentally squealing with glee rather than freaking out. The adrenaline rush seemed to sober me up in a blink.
I’m kissing Charlie.
And dear god, it was hot as hell. Hotter than the time my high school girlfriend went down on me in the limousine on prom night. Hotter than the time my old girlfriend Charlotte let me try anal sex with her. Hotter than the night Darci answered the door in nothing but thigh-highs and stiletto heels.
All this from just a kiss.
I couldn’t stop from lifting my fingers to trace his plump lips. I marveled at how similar and yet so very different they were from any others I’d ever kissed before. My eyes connected with Charlie’s as I caressed his mouth, and my breath caught in my lungs when he softly kissed the tip of one of my fingers. The move should have been nothing, but somehow it changed everything in the blink of an eye.
I couldn’t even imagine how incredible it would feel to do more than kiss Charlie. Without even thinking about it, I knew I wanted to see his creamy skin. I knew I wanted to taste it. My hands were on the hem of his shirt before my next breath, and it took me a minute to slow down and remember there was another person’s feelings to consider. I didn’t want to attack the guy if he was an unwilling participant.